Date: Mon, 05 Apr 1999 10:54:22 +1000 From: Greg Black <gjb@comkey.com.au> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Timezone question Message-ID: <19990405005423.480.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> In-Reply-To: <19990404132026.T2142@lemis.com> of Sun, 04 Apr 1999 13:20:26 %2B0930 References: <19990404044642.A60884@sr.se> <19990404132026.T2142@lemis.com>
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> $ date
> Sun Apr 4 13:09:34 CST 1999
> $ TZ=Europe/Stockholm date
> Sun Apr 4 05:39:43 CEST 1999
> $ TZ=America/Chicago date
> Sat Apr 3 21:39:54 CST 1999
> $
>
> Note the imaginative time zone abbreviations, some of which I think
> are just plain wrong.
It could be argued that date(1) is wrong to display those
alphabetic timezones and that it ought to change over to the
same numeric form that is now almost universally used in email
date headers:
$ gbdate
Mon, 05 Apr 1999 10:47:12 +1000
$ TZ=Europe/Stockholm gbdate
Mon, 05 Apr 1999 02:47:14 +0200
$ TZ=America/Chicago gbdate
Sun, 04 Apr 1999 19:47:24 -0500
This tells readers, both human and automated, exactly which
timezone we're talking about and avoids all the ambiguity of the
alphabetic timezone names which seem to get chosen by local
authorities (or pseudo-authorities) without reference to the
rest of the world.
> You need to be sure that NT has the correct time zone information.
> Windows 95% doesn't for our time zone (South Australia, abbreviated
> SA). It thinks that the time change was at the beginning of March,
> when in fact it was at the end of March. The version I have also
> seems to think that SA reaches all the way to the north of the
> continent, eliminating the Northern Territory: it believes that NT
> doesn't exist :-)
I've seen reports that W95 insisted on changing to summer time
in Queensland when it first came out and that Microsoft refused
to consider this a bug on the grounds that Queensland had *once*
used summer time. (I have never used W9x or WNT, so I have no
direct knowledge about this.)
--
Greg Black <gjb@acm.org>
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